Fine catch and tidy overs show value in Cornwall

Hwest Indies spinner casts aside his weight to deliver show of steady bowling, but he lacks variety in the angle of delivery

When Trent Bridge staged its inaugural Test, England had neither a strength and conditioning coach nor a nutritionist in their back-room staff – in fact they had no backroom staff at all for the first Ashes Test at Nottingham in 1899 – so nobody recorded WG Grace’s weight when he went into the game.

We know that WG was booed by parts of the Trent Bridge crowd for being so slow in the field, and CB Fry noted when batting with Grace that he could not run anything more than a single.

But “the Champion” was 50, and it was his last match for England and, by then, he was probably the heaviest person to play Test cricket, until Rahkeem Cornwall bowled off-spin for West Indies and weighed in at 22st.

Cornwall comes from Liberta in the south of Antigua, a settlement of distinguished history.

It was here, as the name suggests, and in neighbouring Freemans Village where the island’s first emancipated slaves tilled the soil to make a living less brutal than in the sugar plantations.

Liberta took pride in being selfsufficient and, in time, in its cricket team. Little more than a generation ago, Antigua was producing more Test cricketers per capita than anywhere else on Earth, even Barbados.

Sir Vivian Richards grew up in the capital St John’s, but not the fast bowlers such as Sir Anderson Roberts, Sir Curtly Ambrose, the Benjamins – Kenny and Winston, not related – and George Ferris. They grew up representing their villages in fiercely contested league games.

By a decade ago, however, Antigua sometimes did not even have a representative in the Leeward Islands team. Cricket had been central to the community when the Leewards and West Indies played at the Recreation Ground in the heart of St John’s. When a new stadium was built, it was out of sight in the countryside and out of mind.

There was more than that, though, to cricket’s sudden decline in Antigua. The pitches of the village clubs naturally deteriorated with time, and there was neither the know-how nor the money to relay them.

Liberta stopped playing cricket, and it took the energy and fundraising of Kenny Benjamin, who had bowled fast for Worcestershire as well as West Indies, to renovate the village’s ground.

Cornwall, in his third Test, has not, so far, been able to regain the initiative which West Indies lost after Southampton.

He has bowled steadily, as he has done in taking more than 300 first